Transcendental Puppets

Kant and Kleist

Jarkko Toikkanen

Abstract
The possibility of transcendence in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the
literature of Heinrich von Kleist plays at the limits of what can be presented in
language. Starting out from the former’s objective to establish a new idealism,
this essay observes the importance of the rhetorical device of hypotyposis—the
verbal description of visual images—to Kant’s system, and then turns to
Kleist’s struggle with and ultimate rejection of that system. His famous story
“Über das Marionettentheater” (1810) is used to point to the pitfalls of
linguistic presenting. Paul de Man’s readings of both Kant and Kleist are
acknowledged for their focus on language, but the author of this essay also in-
dicates where de Man’s strictly formalistic approach might fall short. When
that happens, the failure of the puppet show as a transcendental presentation
may be experienced as the end beyond which there is nothing. In the context of
the current volume, this failure is significant in demonstrating how
encounters between different beliefs and philosophies may have drastic
consequences for those involved even if their dialogue is based on nothing solid,
as the following discussion will venture to display.

Introduction
The possibility of transcendence in the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) and the literature of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-
1811), as I will argue, plays at the limits of what can be presented
in language. Starting out from the former’s objective to establish
a new idealism, I first move on to observing the importance of
the rhetorical device of hypotyposis—the verbal description of
visual images—to Kant’s system and then turn to Kleist’s struggle
with and ultimate rejection of that system. His famous essay
“Über das Marionettentheater” (1810) is used to point to the
pitfalls of linguistic presenting. Paul de Man’s readings of both
Kant and Kleist are helpful because of their focus on language,
but I will also indicate where his strictly formalistic approach
2 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
might fall short. When that happens, the failure of the puppet
show as a transcendental presentation may be experienced as the
end beyond which there is nothing. In the context of the current
volume, this failure is significant in demonstrating how
encounters between different beliefs and philosophies may have
drastic consequences for those involved even if their dialogue is
based on nothing solid, as the following discussion will venture
to display.

Kant’s Idealism
Kant’s aim with his critical philosophy was to establish a break
between his own thinking and the old theologies, dualisms, and
logical rationalist systems that, in Sebastian Gardner’s words,
seemed to operate out of a metaphysical sphere that had us
“vacillate between dogmatism, skepticism and indifference”
(Gardner 1999: 1). With them it was either God, the division of
body and mind, or natural reason that was deemed the tran-
scendent “real” on which everything else was built: there was
something in such an understanding of experience that Kant
wished to fix with his effort.1 For instead of considering thought
as a process that only came into being after “reality” was already
well in existence, he wanted to make it clear that thought in a
way preceded reality and made it available for experience, time
after time, by supplying form. In other words, against what he
saw as the metaphysical rule of transcendent, reality-legislating
entities such as God and nature, and our struggle with them,
Kant sought to install new knowledge for “conditions of possible
experience” (Caygill 1995: 399).

1 Howard Caygill, for instance, relates Kant’s “great dissatisfac-

tion” with his predecessor Christian Wolff’s metaphysics and his “sym-
pathetic disagreement” with Christian August Crusius’s critique of
Wolff (1995: 291). In Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der
Metaphysik (1766; see Kant 1912), Kant describes them as the “airy
builders of various imagined worlds” (“die Luftbaumeister der
mancherlei Gedankenwelten”) with whose suggestions it has been his
“fate to fall in love with” (“in welche ich das Schicksal habe verliebt zu
sein”).
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 3
Kant called this philosophy transcendental idealism. First, it
was to be transcendental because the question of metaphysics re-
fused to go away: metaphysical discourse did employ “the same
cognitive power as is employed in commonsense and scientific
judgments about the world of experience” (Gardner 1999: 21).
This means that metaphysics, along with its ruling transcendent
entities, did not just suddenly become invalid or useless—there
had to be a new, transcendental way of conceiving and talking
about these entities, making “cognition itself an object of
philosophical enquiry” (23). In this context, we do not need to
dwell on how (and whether) Kant achieved the feat in all of his
writings. We only need to recognise the enduring necessity of the
metaphysical question and the transcendental space it keeps
open for such experiences which at any time appear to transcend
understanding.
Second, Kant’s philosophy was idealism because it dealt
with the conditions that first make cognition and experience pos-
sible, and such a priori conditions cannot be made into a prin-
ciple except in the form of ideas that, transcendentally, precede
any actual form. With other solutions one risks falling back to
metaphysics. In the third Critique, Kant makes the base difference
between transcendental and metaphysical principles in the
following terms:
A transcendental principle is one through which the univer-
sal a priori condition under which alone things can become
objects of our cognition at all is represented. By contrast, a
principle is called metaphysical if it represents the a priori
condition under which alone objects whose concept must be
given empirically can be further determined a priori.2

2 “Ein transzendentales Prinzip ist dasjenige, durch welches die

allgemeine Bedingung a priori vorgestellt wird, under der allein Dinge

Objekte unserer Erkenntnis überhaupt werden können. Dagegen heisst
ein Prinzip metaphysisch, wenn es, die Bedingung a priori vorstellt,
unter der allein Objekte, deren Begriff empirisch gegeben sein muss, a
priori weiter bestimmt werden können” (Kant 2000: 68).
4 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
Paul de Man has interpreted this passage as saying that whereas
“metaphysical principles lead to the identification and defini-
tion, to the knowledge, of a natural principle that is not itself a
concept,” “transcendental principles lead to the definition of a
conceptual principle of possible existence” (de Man 1996b: 71).
Such a “natural principle” is metaphysical exactly because it im-
plies the existence of a transcendent, reality-legislating entity —
in this case, one derived from nature—that reduces all objects
and concepts we meet into nothing but proof of its own exist-
ence.3 In contrast, as de Man sees it, a transcendental principle
only provides a reflexive basis for cognition to consider its own
“possible existence,” and the way we understand things is not
determined from a transcendent vantage point.
That is not to say, however, that such vantage points could
be simply erased. Instead, for reasons shown, they linger on as
ideas in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. But how can we talk
about something so elusive, something by default at odds with
everyday discourse? The question of presentation, and presen-
ting in language, resurfaces here. In the first Critique Kant aims
to show how “intuition takes place only in so far as the object is
given to us … [and] in so far as the mind is affected in a certain
way”4 in accordance with transcendental schemata—that is, how
concepts of understanding are directly combined with sensible
intuitions for presentation. In the third Critique, however, Kant
claims that such curious intuition exists too that is unable to
perform this cognitive function directly. There the object to be
presented is rather “given” in a roundabout fashion, passing
through the strange realm of symbolic language on its way to-
wards us.

3 One might argue that examples of such petitio principii in Enlight-

enment thought could be found, among others, in Newton’s universal
laws that govern natural phenomena, Leibniz’s natural descent of
knowledge from the abstract towards the concrete level, and Hume’s
sceptical empiricism where nature forever escapes reason.
4“Diese findet aber nur statt, sofern uns der Gegenstand gegeben
wird; dieses aber ist wiederum nur dadurch möglich, dass er das Ge-
müt auf gewisse Weise affiziere” (Kant 1929: 65).
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 5
Kant’s Hypotyposis
This observation brings us to the rhetorical device of hypotypo-
sis and how it figures in the context. As a tool that has tradition-
ally provided abstract notions with tangible form—Quintilian,
for instance, claimed hypotyposis as “the expression in words of
a given situation in such a way that it seems to be a matter of
seeing rather than of hearing”5—the device taps into the descrip-
tive powers of language, visual and aural, in all verbal com-
munication, philosophy included. Howard Caygill has defined
the Kantian hypotyposis as something “in the guise of ‘pre-
sentation’ or the rendering of concepts and ideas in ‘terms of
sense’” (Caygill 1995: 231). This “rendering” further divides into
“schematic” and “symbolic” hypotyposes, of which, in Kant’s
words, the first contains “direct” and the second “indirect
representations of the concept.” Subsequently, he tells us the
schemata do the presentation “demonstratively” and the
symbolic “by means of an analogy” which acts as a “transporta-
tion of the reflection on one object of intuition to another, quite
different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly
correspond” (Kant 2000: 226-27). 6 Whereas the schematic de-
monstration, in other words, gives us its object directly, the
symbolic analogy must approach it indirectly because it is
possible that the intuited object can never be grasped as such. To
put it differently, while “nature” schematically indeed refers to
something called nature, it is a completely different matter to
show that the idea of nature symbolically corresponds with other
ideas such as beauty and goodness.

5 Quintilian was one of the first authors to discuss the notion of

hypotyposis in some detail. The reference is to Institutio oratoria 9.2.40–
44 where Quintilian exalts Cicero’s rhetorical technique over those of
later authors such as Celsus and Seneca. See Quintilian 2001, vol. 4: 56–
58.
6 The original text of the Critique of the Power of Judgment says: “der
Übertragung der Reflexion über einen Gegenstand der Anschauung
auf einen ganz anderen Begriff, dem vielleict nie eine Anschauung
direkt korrespondieren kann.”
6 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
From this observation, it is not difficult to see why hypoty-
posis should play such an important part in Kant’s system of
transcendental idealism, even if the philosopher did not seem to
appreciate the art of rhetoric as such, as Rodolphe Gasché has
noted. 7 Without the link that the device provides in bringing
mere abstract ideas in line with other abstract ideas and their
sensible presentations, there is no way for philosophy to ensure
that what we see actually represents what we think it does—and
to adjust our course of action accordingly. On the one hand, with
a schematic hypotyposis, such adjustment sounds simple
enough; if I am presented with a person drowning, I will think
that what I see is a person drowning, and can respond with a
proper course of action. Doing so demonstrates the
transcendental function of directly connecting a schematic hy-
potyposis (being presented with a person drowning) first with a
concept of understanding (thinking there is a person drowning)
and then with an empirical action (helping the person out of the
danger). A symbolic hypotyposis, on the other hand, is a more
curious entity—one that indirectly transports any reflection, as
de Man said, to “another, quite different concept.” In witnessing
the scene of a person drowning, I might suddenly become
concerned with ideas such as whether I “should” be acting at all
or whether it was “right” to save this particular person from
drowning, and the hesitation would demonstrate the often
disruptive effect of a symbolic hypotyposis. For just like beauty
and goodness, and what guarantees them as such, also duty and
justice require indirect, roundabout representation.
De Man discusses Kant’s notion of hypotyposis in the essay
“The Epistemology of Metaphor.” He begins by studying, and
dismissing, Locke’s and Condillac’s solutions to related matters,

7 Gasché starts out by noticing how Kant’s “invectives against

rhetoric… at times even seem to share the Enlightenment’s open hostil-
ity toward it” (2003: 202), but, as he then establishes Kant’s hypotyposis
as “a transcendental presentation” (210), he argues that, in the end,
hypotyposis “serves to conceptualize the elemental philosophical dis-
tinction of the shapedness of shapes, of the formedness of forms, and
so on, in a way similar to what Aristotle intended with the verbal form
of hypotypoun” (216). In this specific manner, the rhetorical device
remains indispensable for Kant’s system.
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 7
but when he gets to Kant, de Man finds himself in an interesting
situation. He quotes the same sentence that I did above (symbolic
hypotyposis as a “transportation of the reflection on one object
of intuition to another, quite different concept, to which perhaps
no intuition can ever directly correspond”), except that he uses a
different translation and highlights the word “perhaps.” That
makes all the difference for de Man. Not only does the single
“perhaps” bring out the radical indirectness of symbolic
hypotyposis, but it also puts at serious risk the stability of the
schematic one: when the impossibility of direct correspondence
is “said, even in passing, to be ‘perhaps’ possible, the theory of a
schematic hypotyposis loses much of its power of conviction”
(de Man 1996a: 47).8 The notion is flawed because the forms it
presents us with may not be trusted. After all, how are we to
believe that we have access to a “clean category of
epistemologically reliable tropes” (Loesberg 1997: 90) in any
given situation, real life or hypothetical, if there is the slightest
chance the tropes do not function as we think they do? What if
the thought of saving the person from drowning was bound to
be only a misunderstanding, an illusion, an unreality? With that
lingering concern we find ourselves in the world of Kleist.

Kleist’s Crisis
The young Kleist believed strongly in the rational tenets of En-
lightenment. In a letter to his sister from 1799 he expresses this
faith:
I hear a thousand people speak and see them act and it never
occurs to me to ask after the why? Nor do they know, they
follow obscure inclinations, their action are determined by

8 As it occurs, de Man’s argument hinges on its looking away from

the symbolic towards schematic hypotyposis. The failure of the Kantian
symbol to “perhaps” ever directly correspond to an intuition is turned
into a systematic failure of its schematic counterpart. But one could take
Kant’s “perhaps” as referring to something symbolic which human
understanding can never have direct intuition of—not an infrequent
motif in Kant. Such a compromise might spare the transcendental view.
8 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
the moment. They never come of age and their fate is the
plaything of chance. [--] No free person, no thinking person,
stays where chance happens to thrust him… [--] He de-
termines according to his reason what manner of happiness
is the highest for him, he devises a plan for his life [ Lebens-
plan] and strives towards his goal with all his strength and in
accordance with securely founded principles. (Kleist 2004:
418)9
As we know from Kleist’s later stages, his youthful conviction in
“securely founded principles” took a beating with the start of the
new century and an encounter with what he referred to as “the
new, the so-called Kantian, philosophy” in a letter from March
1801, addressed to his fiancée. Kleist describes himself as “deep-
ly and painfully shaken” by an idea in that philosophy (421)10
that presents, as James Phillips also notices, a somewhat
Cartesian conundrum of what would happen if “people all had
green lenses instead of eyes” and they would never know
“whether the eye shows them things as they are or whether it
isn’t adding something to them belonging not to them but the
eye” (Constantine 2004: 421; also Phillips 2007: 3). 11 Kleist’s
Kantkrise, in other words, was one in which the new philosophy

9 “Tausend Menschen höre ich reden and sehe ich handeln, und es
fällt mir nicht ein, nach dem Warum? zu fragen. Sie selbst wissen es
nicht, dunkle Neigungen leiten sie, der Augenblick bestimmt ihre
Handlungen. Sie bleiben für immer unmündig und ihr Schicksal ein
Spiel des Zufalls .... Ein freier, denkender Mensch bleibt da nicht stehen,
wo der Zufall ihn hinstösst.... Er bestimmt nach seiner Vernunft,
welches Glück für ihn das höchste sei, er entwirft sich seinen Lebens-
plan, und strebt seinem Ziele nach sicher aufgestellten Grundsätzen
mit allen seinen Kräften entgegen.” Kleist’s original text can be found
at http://www.kleist.org/briefe/005.htm.
10Kleist’s expression is “so tief, so schmerzhaft erschütter[t],”
found at http://www.kleist.org/briefe/037.htm.
11“Wenn alle Menschen statt der Augen grüne Gläser hätten... nie
würden entscheiden können, ob ihr Auge ihnen Dinge zeigt, wie sie
sind, oder ob es nicht etwas ihnen hinzutut, was nicht ihnen, sondern
dem Auge gehört.” Kleist, http://www.kleist.org/briefe/037.htm.
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 9
had undermined his conviction in being able to know things as
they “really” are and plan one’s whole life accordingly.
Of course, Kant’s whole aim had been to rattle exactly such
convictions but, for him, this did not spell a personal crisis. His
response to the loss of metaphysical certainty, as Seán Allan has
observed, came in the form of a transcendental system that
strove “to preserve the notion of morality itself” by separating
duty (Pflicht) from inclination (Neigung) and gave us free rein
over our moral actions (Allan 1996: 34). Yet such a solution was
not apparently to Kleist’s old-fashioned liking, even if he could
not deny the impact of Kant’s thought on himself. James Phillips
suggests this was because he did not appreciate the “Kantian
juggernaut” that strove to integrate all things and entities into
“the totality of human experience” and as such took their cog-
nitive availability for granted. Because of his dogmatic strain,
Kleist instead wished to preserve “the unknowability of things
in themselves” (Phillips 2007: 13). Allan, on the other hand, sees
Kleist’s rejection as “all the more ironic” as the youth seems to
have regarded “Kant’s philosophy not as an affirmation of
human freedom, but on the contrary, as a final, and indeed
insurmountable, obstacle to its assertion”—even if Kant had
intended just the opposite by letting individuals “choose to act
in accordance with the dictates of their moral will” (Allan 1996:
35). Yet Kleist must not have believed in this view, for as he
deplores in another letter to his fiancée in April 1801, foreboding
future writings, “we think that we are free and yet in reality we
are wholly at the mercy of chance that leads us along by a
thousand finely spun threads.”12
On another occasion, it would be very interesting to study
how Kleist’s plays in the first decade of the 1800s exhibit symp-
toms of the Kant crisis in their various ways. Robert E. Helbling,
for instance has noted how “Kleist’s drama contains its own
version of hamartia, tragic error” and “[t]he term for it which
[Kleist] puts in the mouths of some of his characters is the rather

12 “Ach, Wilhelmine, wir dünken uns frei, und der Zufall führt uns
allgewaltig an tausend feingesponnenen Fäden fort.” Kleist quoted in
Allan 1996: 35, original text found at
http://www.kleist.org/briefe/041.htm.
10 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
untranslatable Versehen, suggesting something like ‘mis-
apprehension’ of reality” (1975: 49). And true enough, the erratic
and often terrible consequences of Versehen can be witnessed in
plays such as Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803), Amphitryon (1807),
and Penthesilea (1808). In this context, however, I will focus on
Kleist’s enigmatic 1810 essay “Über das Marionettentheater.” My
objective is to indicate how Kleist’s inability to adopt the Kantian
worldview actually results from a different conception of what
can be presented in language. Kant’s philosophy claims that all
experience adheres to a transcendental condition that ensures
that any sensible presentation, or hypotyposis, successfully
connects understanding with intuition (notwithstanding de
Man’s deconstructive criticism of the “perhaps”). Kleist’s
literature suggests that there is no way of ensuring such success.
As I now move on to show, in the Kleistian world intuitions are
instead bound to be confused with understandings that lead up
to further misunderstandings—of describing as proof, or
trusting as truth—which poignantly evince the necessity of such
answers and the metaphysical question looming behind them.
Transcend the gap we must, but never can.

“Über das Marionettentheater”

“Über das Marionettentheater” is a tale of two men debating. It
consists of their meeting at a town square, where both are watch-
ing a puppet show, and the back-and-forth dialogue that ensues.
The essay has attracted many commentators over the last two
centuries and, as Helbling says, it “has often tempted the critics
to use it as a magic key to unlock the secret of Kleist’s world”
(1975: 35). Possible themes range from the limits of human reason
to the infinity of divine reason, from the problem of self-
consciousness to its absence in inanimate things, from nostalgia
for a lost paradise to a future political utopia, and they all opt to
explain the enduring popularity of Kleist’s essay. For my part, to
highlight the difference between Kant’s and Kleist’s separate
vantage points on how hypotyposis works, I will analyse one
specific passage with an eye for its overall significance, an-
ticipating an unexpected experience for the reader at the end of
the puppet show.
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 11
Die Puppen brauchen den Boden nur, wie die Elfen, um ihn
zu streifen, und den Schwung der Glieder, durch die augen-
blickliche Hemmung neu zu beleben; wir brauchen ihn, um
darauf zu ruhen, und uns von der Anstrengung des Tanzes
zu erholen: ein Moment, der offenbar selber kein Tanz ist,
und mit dem sich weiter nichts anfangen läßt, als ihn mög-
lichst verschwinden zu machen.
Puppets need the ground only to glance against lightly, like
elves, and through this momentary check to renew the swing
of their limbs. We humans must have it to rest on, to recover
from the effort of the dance. This moment of rest is clearly no
part of the dance. The best we can do is make it as
inconspicuous as possible.13
In Kleist’s essay, at the time when Herr C makes the above claim,
the debate has surged from the universal mechanics of the
marionettes first to the soul of the puppeteer controlling them
and then to the pathetic failure of contemporary dancers to
express themselves with grace. Herr C’s point about how pup-
pets are distinguished from humans recapitulates one of his ma-
jor ideas that inanimate, mechanical dancers are more godlike
and gracious than their animate, organic counterparts. With this
particular claim, however, there is more at stake, and the logic of
the argument is seen as relying on one specific symbol: that of
“ground” (Boden). Whereas a transcendent entity such as God
requires no earthly ground to perpetuate his omnipotence, both
puppets and humans do—the difference is that the former need
it “only to glance against lightly” to keep them in motion, in a
continuous mechanical fashion, while humanity “must have [the
ground] to rest on.” Our fate, in other words, depends on the
solidity of a site where we can recover and aim to start again,
with the least distraction and exposure possible.
Because puppets do not require this forced period of
inactivity, they transcend what we are capable of and so aspire

13Original at http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/593/1. Transl. Idris

Parry at http://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm and in Parry 1981.
12 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
to a divine status. 14 Since their show, nonetheless, is unques-
tionably there for us to witness and it remains within our sight,
unlike God’s presence, they do not step out of our realm
completely. Instead, the idea of what the puppets might rep-
resent lingers, presented before our eyes in the form of the
continuing show. They are encountered as transcendental in this
very sense: as beings of both the heavenly and the earthly plane
which, for Herr C at least, reflect and justify our own ambition.
But on what exactly is such justification based? What ensures the
connectedness of our actions with those of the puppets? In the
given example, the symbol of the ground does. Apart from mere
resemblances and analogies of physical movement, Boden
provides the material uniting link between us and the dolls: we
both exist upon it and are able to preserve motion thanks to it. In
contrast to God, they are here and we are here, but because the
dancing dolls’ capabilities transcend ours, we can logically infer
there is another, divine plane of being beyond ours.
Thematically oriented interpretations of “Über das Marion-
ettentheater” have often run with this insight to insist how Kleist,
either for his own or someone else’s sake, seeks to close the gap
between the two planes of being. Jeffrey Cox, for instance, has
found Kleist’s essay as being obsessed with
two central Romantic alternatives to man’s entrapment in the
self: an unreflective state that seeks a prelapsarian natural
grace, and a fully imaginative state that discovers a visionary
unity between self and world. (Cox 1986: 261)
With this gesture, Cox reduces the text into a self-centred re-
hearsal of familiar themes and dissolves the chance (or worth) of
reading Kleist rhetorically, as a piece of writing concerned with
how such themes can be articulated at all. Somewhat similarly,
Evelyn Cobley has understood the essay as foreseeing “Hegel’s
dialectical process [as] problematic not only because the
possibility of sublation is at best doubtful but also because the
desire for spontaneity is from the start misconceived.” She wants
to say that since Kleist is the Romantic who longs for this kind of
spontaneous expression and Hegel is part of the Enlightenment

14 We could raise the theological question here as to why God

rested on the seventh day, but I will ignore it for now.
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 13
tradition whose related ideal of progress “sublates” disastrously
into “fascist terror” and “death camps” a century later (Cobley
2003: 28, 31), “Über das Marionettentheater” presents little more
than an unwitting prologue to such history.
Meanwhile, de Man has sought to indicate why Kleist’s
essay achieves nothing of the sort and instead falls itself in the
very gap it exposes, unable to promote or argue for any given
theme. In his essay “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s ‘Über das
Marionettentheater’,” he starts by considering Kleist’s rejection
of contemporary trends as his inevitable fallout with the
naturalised pathos promoted by luminaries such as Schiller.
Peeling off these influences layer by layer, de Man finally wit-
nesses Kleist’s essay as the “extreme formalization” of the poly-
semous ambiguity of the German word Fall which, in taking
many different forms, keeps recurring in the essay “in a manner
that stretches it from the theological Fall to the dead pendulum
of the puppet’s limbs to the grammatical declension of nouns
and pronouns” (de Man 1984: 289-90). De Man concludes:
But Fälle, of course, also means in German “trap,” the trap
which is the ultimate textual model of this and of all texts,
the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses
dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with
the gracefulness of a dance. This dance, regardless of whe-
ther it occurs as mirror, as imitation, as history, as the fencing
match of interpretation, or as the anamorphic transforma-
tions of tropes, is the ultimate trap, as unavoidable as it is
deadly. (1984: 290)
As I regard it, against the rather trite interpretations of Cox and
Cobley, de Man’s reading is much preferable because it retrieves
the question of language involved in the tale of two men de-
bating and, in doing so, it paves the way for the return of the
rhetorical device of hypotyposis, Kant’s systematic resorting to
it, and Kleist’s obstinate refusal to go along with the Kantian so-
lution. In studying the symbol of the ground as we have done,
the logic behind all this comes into view.
The difference between schematic and symbolic hypotypos-
es was defined earlier in terms of directness and indirectness,
and it is not too difficult to apply that criterion in the case of
14 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
Boden. Understood directly, as a physical phenomenon, the
ground is something that the puppets actually require to main-
tain their mechanical motion and that humans can rest and re-
cover on. Understood indirectly, however, the ground becomes
an abstract entity that, as de Man put it, transports reflection
from its schematic reference to “another, quite different concept”
that it symbolises. Kleist’s Boden, in other words, turns from its
existence as concrete matter into a mediating notion that, just like
concrete matter, supports humans and dolls alike. As this,
consequently, proves our similarity and connectedness, it also
becomes true that we are justified, both logically and morally, in
our pursuit of the higher plane the puppets represent—the
metaphysical domain of a transcendent God remains beyond our
reach but the vivid transcendental gestures of the inanimate
dolls by no means do. A literary transcendence, as Herr C seems
to echo Kant, is always possible because of the mediate
presentations of language which allow us to experience and
confirm what we may never grasp as such. Through the play of
hypotyposis the puppets do not appear as mere things on a
string to be watched unresponsively, but rather as cognitive
objects with deep vested significance.
As we may recall, however, de Man suggested that the
ground from which Herr C’s transcendental aspirations take
flight appears precarious at best, riddled with dangerous pitfalls.
We must keep in mind that “Über das Marionettentheater” is a
tale of two men debating, not a philosophical treatise or lesson
in argumentation. It certainly presumes to make use of these
aims but not as direct proof of their truth or the point-by-point
analysis of any given postulate. In de Man’s words,
although Marionettentheater can be said to be about proof, it is
not set up as one but as the story or trope of such a
demonstration” which, in due course, becomes “a scene of
persuasion” that “shows people engaged in the act of telling
... and problematizes the relationship between a rhetoric and
a hermeneutics of persuasion.” (1984: 268-69)
As such, the tale ebbs and flows, from the narrator’s voluntary
acquiescence to Herr C’s authoritative musings and moments of
reciprocating trust and disbelief—or transitory exposure made
as “inconspicuous as possible”—to two concluding anecdotes
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 15
that seemingly digress from the main plot but bring the whole to
an emblematically Kleistian climax.
I will not render the anecdotes in detail because I wish to
encourage the reader to turn to them herself. Put briefly, the first
one describes an impressionable youth who loses his ability to
perform gracefully because of an unfortunate incident involving
a classical artwork, attempted mimicry, and the barely checked
ridicule of his teacher. For the second one, Herr C gives an off-
the-wall travel account of a bear reared domestically at a Baltic
farm against whom he is goaded into an impossible fencing
match. It is true these bizarre snippets are at first confusing. But,
when viewed from the vantage point of aspiring for tran-
scendence (for something we cannot do, something beyond our
cognitive ken), the lesson learned is clarified. There is the young
man who does not cope either with the grace of a statue or his
teacher-narrator’s gaze, and there is Herr C frustrated by the
superior bear who never attacks but dodges or parries his every
blow, and together there is what both of them share: the human
urge to take on what we see as non-human because of what we
think it represents.
For the youth, the graceful statue represents a transcenden-
tal ideal that he cannot reach and whose failure is made all the
worse by his teacher’s demeaning response. According to de
Man, the tragedy is not that of a simple “game” that the youth
could have continued on his own for ages but that of trust’s
betrayal. Meanwhile, Herr C’s encounter with the “transcen-
dental bear” which sees and knows more than he ever will soon
turns into one against the very limits of understanding (de Man
1984: 278, 283). As the beast confronts Herr C staring, reading his
soul in his eyes (“Aug in Auge, als ob er meine Seele darin lesen
könnte”), it always stays one move ahead, and so his urge to
connect with it, literally or figuratively, can only go unfulfilled.
As de Man says, “Such is language: it always thrusts but never
scores. It always refers but never to the right referent” (285).
These scenes and insights remind us that, in Kleist, the
metaphysical question remains because it cannot be eliminated.
16 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
Instead, it keeps staring at us. 15 In “Über das Marionettenthe-
ater” we are therefore faced with the hypotyposis of two men
debating a puppet show and other sights, swaying between trust
and disbelief, shame and exposure, and the unreliable ground on
which it all takes place. It is also possible the show might just
stop, having run out of images and the words to describe them.
What kind of experience would that be?

End of the World

Mithin, sagte ich ein wenig zerstreut, müßten wir wieder von
dem Baum der Erkenntnis essen, um in den Stand der Un-
schuld zurückzufallen? Allerdings, antwortete er, das ist das
letzte Kapitel von der Geschichte der Welt.
“Does that mean,” I said in some bewilderment, “that we
must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to
the state of innocence?”
“Of course,” he said, “but that’s the final chapter in the his-
tory of the world.”16
If we were ever to regain, as Herr C envisions, an ideal paradisi-
acal state beyond confusion, betrayal, and shame as we might
have enjoyed before the Fall, how on earth could we manage
that? In view of the preceding dialogue and the puppet show be-
fore their eyes, the narrator wonders if the only way to return to
innocence would actually be through more knowledge instead of
the opposite. Instead of letting go of our needs, urges, and
desires to explain, investigate, and peruse, should we not rather
heat up the pursuit—watch and learn from puppets, making up
more and more off-kilter arguments and anecdotes to force
language to its limits? As the narrator finds himself “ein wenig

15 Bianca Theisen has found “the bear’s grace, the innocent and in-
fallible certainty with which he is able to distinguish between deception
and non-deception in his opponent [as] nothing but the blind-spot of
the dancer’s self-observations” (2006: 529). While her interpretation
may be useful in questions of self-reflection, it does not remove the
problem of the stare.
16 Original at http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/593/1, transl. by
Parry, at http://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm and Parry 1981
 TRANSCENDENTAL PUPPETS 17
zerstreut” at the end, instead of Parry’s “in some bewilderment,”
de Man observes his state “not only as distracted but also
dispersed, scattered, and dismembered” and in doing so he
appears to tap on a disturbing undercurrent (de Man 1984: 289).
For as words fly out of our mouths at any time to describe and
explain what we see, there is no given trajectory that they will
trace and indicate where they will land. Inasmuch as there is both
distraction and hope over what anything means or will result in,
the belief always comes with a poignant sense of loss and
banishment exposed to recurring sweeps of shame and fear of
death.
Kant’s lesson in curbing such unsettling randomness was a
philosophy of transcendental idealism that had the tools to
ensure that, whenever we so wished, anything we saw corre-
sponded with what we said. If, for example, we sought to dem-
onstrate successfully how human ambition to reach a higher
plane could be explained by describing the meaning of a puppet
show, hypotyposis made it possible through the symbol of the
ground. In “Über das Marionettentheater,” the character of Herr
C appears to embody the support for such proof, and surely
enough, his connections between the needs of humanity and the
pathetic failures of contemporary dance do beckon in the
direction. 17 Yet, as I have been saying, “Über das Marionet-
tentheater” is not a work of philosophy but a tale of two men
debating. While partial to that view, de Man, in focusing exclu-
sively on Kleist’s rhetorical complexities, concludes his reading
in a claim to “extreme formalization” in which we are left only
with “the ultimate textual model of this and of all texts.” But in
what way do we feel such a model?
In my experience there are at least three points to start to
answer that question. First, heeding Kleist’s lesson that what we
demand is more knowledge, not less, there is never respite or
getting away from needing to describe what we see. Second,

17 Lucia Ruprecht echoes Herr C in observing how “[t]he failure of

the Kleistian protagonist … is not that he acts where he should be na-
tural, as Schiller would put it. He fails as performer: he cannot cope
with his exposure on stage, or in front of a beholder” (Ruprecht 2006:
41).
18 POETICS OF TRANSCENDENCE
since hypotyposis, although necessary, remains essentially in-
capable of ensuring that what we see actually corresponds with
what we say, one can never verify having attained what one set
out to attain. No transcendental ambition can carry out its own
plan—it can only confirm that it must exist, in language. This
leads us to my third and final point. Because there is no end to
description and no end to not knowing for sure, we can only
describe the end of the world as we think we know it. The readers of
Kleist referred to have thought that beyond the end of “Über das
Marionettentheater” either religious nostalgia or Romantic
wishfulness awaits (Cox), or idealist utopia and historical di-
saster (Cobley). 18 When these knowledges are realised as
symbolic hypotyposes, however, or descriptions that function
only indirectly and thus fail in connecting the proof of the puppet
show to the arguments they claim to support the ground ( Boden)
falls from beneath them. At first, we are then reminded of de
Man’s entrapment in the formal involutions of language, but,
according to its logic, even that insight cannot last beyond the
essay’s end. The encounter stops there, meaning nothing. And so
we are finally left with the experience of an end beyond which
there is nothing, no heaven or hell, utopia or dystopia, living
essence or dead matter, words, or images. There is only the
end—“the final chapter in the history of the world”—and the full
stop, an experience of sheer horror.

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18Not all thematic interpretations of “Über das Marionettenthe-

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